MSNBC's Finney bails on Hewitt

MSNBC’s Karen Finney on Monday hung up on conservative talker Hugh Hewitt after he repeatedly asked her during an interview on his radio show to say whether Alger Hiss was a communist.

Hewitt had Finney on his program to discuss her statement on her weekend show that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s rhetoric on health care is reminiscent of the “fear stoking” of Joe McCarthy, who she said “also wanted to take his country back, then it was from the communists who had supposedly infiltrated it.” While Cruz’s mission might be different than McCarthy’s, Finney told viewers of her show “Disrupt,” “the rhetoric sounds eerily the same.”

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Hewitt kicked off his interview with Finney by asking, “Did any communists infiltrate the United States government?”

“I think if we go back to the McCarthy hearings, it’s pretty clear that he created a culture of paranoia and fear that people later recognized, they sort of bought into it and then recognized that it was absolutely misplaced,” Finney told Hewitt. “That’s the point.”

Finney asked Hewitt to “go ahead and name them,” and Hewitt replied, “Can you? I’m trying to figure out if you know if any of them did.”

Finney likened his question to the same concept as “Michele Bachmann accusing my friend Huma Abedin of being in the Muslim Brotherhood because somebody she may have known, who may have known, may have known somebody.”

Hewitt, meanwhile, said the two statements weren’t at all alike, and it was “just a historical question” he was asking. The radio host then first posed the question he would repeatedly ask Finney during the five-minute interview.

“Was Alger Hiss a communist?” he asked.

Finney responded, “I understand where you’re going with this, and I get why you want to do this, but again, I think that’s distracting from the point I was trying to make.”

“And the point I was trying to make was you had Joe McCarthy on a mission to root out communism in the government and he did it in such a way that created a hysteria that was very unhealthy for this concern,” she said.

“Karen, Karen, I’m just a little talk show host, I’m not an MSNBC host, I just have history,” Hewitt said. “I just want to know, do you think Alger Hiss was a communist?”

Finney told Hewitt he just “wanted to go down a rabbit hole” with his line of questioning, while the conservative talker said he just wanted “to know if you actually know that Alger Hiss was a communist.”

“What I actually know is that the culture the McCarthy hearings created in this country were dangerous to our democracy,” she said.

The two continued back and forth along the same lines for a few minutes, with Hewitt again asking several times about Hiss.

“I’m not doing this game with you,” Finney said at one point.

“It could be over,” Hewitt replied, adding later, “This is astonishing. You can’t bring yourself to say that Alger Hiss was a communist spy.”

After he posed the question again, Finney hung up on Hewitt, who laughed when he realized she was no longer on the line. “She can’t deal with that question. I am flabbergasted, I am astonished,” he said.

“She has a show on MSNBC called Disrupt and she can’t handle a little tiny question about Alger Hiss,” he added.

After the interview, Hewitt wrote on his blog that “she took offense that I repeated the question, the answer to which would have completely impeached either the credibility of her weekend statement or her basic book learning. She chose to hang-up instead of answering the question.” Finney, he wrote, is “just another in an endless series of talking heads who don’t know enough to engage in basic arguments about the propositions they put forward on air with complete certainty. It is apparent that Finney just isn’t very bright.”

Finney, meanwhile, wrote on Twitter that “I answered — Hewitt was interested in a shout fest not an honest conversation” and called the interview a “pointless waste of time.”